Communication signals may degrade as they travel through different media. For example, an optical signal may suffer from chromatic dispersion (i.e., wavelength dependent dispersion of light) as the signal propagates through an optical fiber. The chromatic dispersion may produce different group delays for optical signals at different channels. Group delay is a change in phase of the signal as a function of change in frequency.
Typically, a dispersion compensation module is used to correct for the group delay variation in signals at different channels. At high data rates (e.g., 40 Gigabytes (GB)/second (s), 100 GB/s, etc.), however, the dispersion compensator module may be unable to meet the demands to compensate for the dispersion and the group delay variation.